The paper examines whether including populist political parties in government coalitions has an impact on their future electoral prospects. According to the theory on party strategy developed by Meguid (2008), this is an accommodating strategy and we expect they will decrease their vote shares after their participation in the executive. Contrary to that, it could be argued that reaching the government makes the issues they own more salient and, above all, leads voters to perceive them as more legitimate. In order to address this question, we take the Chapel Hill surveys to identify populist political parties and analyse the cases of coalition cabinets in Europe where non-populist parties needed to decide whether to ostracise populists or incorporate them into the government. The findings suggest that non-populist parties hinder the rise of populism by including them in coalitions, which has ultimately important consequences for the future of representative democracy in Europe. However, this effect is conditioned by the electoral system of the country and the level of ideological polarization of its party system. Investigating empirically the observable implications of this argument is difficult, however, as there are few comparative cases of populist participation in government and, above all, becoming coalition partners is contingent upon parties’ previous electoral performance. Parties’ electoral fortunes are affected by factors like organizational capacity, ideological consistency and appealing leadership. These features account for variation in vote shares and, as a consequence, for the fact that some parties get into governments whereas others do not.